Post by RobinK on Feb 1, 2007 18:15:56 GMT 12
TALES OF THE SOUTH(?) PACIFIC
Sunderland NZ4117 turned onto final approach to land to the east on the lagoon at Tarawa. The aim was to alight just past the main islet of Betio and parallel to its neighbour Bairiki. The flight from Laucala Bay had been indirect, the aircraft having been tasked to patrol en route. At the time of arrival in the late afternoon of 15 April 1961 fuel was getting low. The aircraft had reserves, but was not going anywhere except the lagoon right there, nor at any time except right now.
But there was a problem. The machine had arrived just as a serious tropical line squall hit the atoll. These things can be of great fury but are normally of short duration. But this one had hung around, delaying the landing. Eventually it abated a little and, although the water was still very rough, the captain decided the time had come.
The lagoon at Tarawa is large, but is reasonably shallow and sheltered particularly from the east, so open-sea swell was not a problem. Because it is so large and the islet periphery so low-lying, however, there is ample fetch for the wind to whip up a significant short-period steep-sided wave train inside the reef. And so it was on this day.
There was no risk of being thrown off the surface by a swell. But, coming the other way at the critical moment, the aircraft met a large, steep-sided wave. Whack – as I've said elsewhere, water is less compressible than dirt.
I was one of three pilots aboard that day, and was standing in the lookout position at the astrodome in the roof. There were no such niceties as being strapped in; the lookout just stood there completely unrestrained. When the aircraft struck, it struck hard enough for me to jump down from the two-foot high platform and look for somewhere to go. Slightly forward and to the right, the navigator had been sitting at his station, task done, waiting for touchdown. On impact he, too, decided he wanted to be somewhere else, and stood up. The result was that we both tried to occupy the same space at the same time, which didn't work.
While we sorted that out the aircraft ploughed on, bucking energetically in the chop. Then it began to sink quite quickly. The keelson had broken under the bow compartment. The planing hull was breached.
The water remained very rough. The break in the keelson could not be dealt with from the inside, and there was no prospect of inspecting the damage or of doing anything about it from the outside until the aircraft was securely moored. Meantime, water was coming into the bow compartment through the break at a great rate.
The APU pump had, as expected, worked briefly and then choked. It was useless. The hand pump could not keep pace with the inflow, though it continued to be used to reduce the effects. This had to be done in relays by crewmembers.
The working stroke on the hand pump was the upstroke - its design assumed an upright stance and the use of the major muscle groups in the back. But it was not possible to stand upright in the bow compartment. Cramped and stooped under the low deckhead, the heavy pull stroke fell to the triceps alone, arms akimbo. With the aircraft still not moored and heaving in the sea, in the confined space and in the enervating temperatures to be expected in equatorial conditions, those doing this heavy work soon succumbed to seasickness. They had no choice but to continue knee-deep in sea water in which now floated their own vomit, and which threatened to spill over the isolating bulkheads into the rearward compartments. This was tenacious stuff, some might say heroic, but it was as much expected of crews as it was necessary. And this crew did have a vested interest!
When the aircraft was finally moored and the squall had subsided, crew members dived over the side to inspect the damage from the outside. After making an impression of the breach with a large piece of Plasticine they reduced the rate of the leak for the time being with coir mats. Then they constructed a plaster-of-Paris mould from the Plasticine former. Finally they melted a (considerable) quantity of solder and formed it using this mould. When it solidified the metal was bolted to the damaged area finally to stop the leak altogether. For the record, a couple of weeks later the recovery crew had shored up the weakened area with timber from the inside, and NZ4117 made it back to Laucala Bay under its own steam for permanent repair. (Since writing this I have found that the aircraft was not repaired, but was written off at Laucala Bay August 1961. My error.)
Mind you, recovery of that particular aircraft was both a priority and a worry. It was rather special, being the only one in the RNZAF fleet to be equipped with then-secret equipment known as Autolycus. This was designed to detect the diesel plume from a submarine snorkel. Obviously it was prone to false alarms as it sniffed other contaminants in the atmosphere, and its indications anyway were coarse and required refinement by other sensors. Presumably it was named for the Shakespearian rogue Autolycus in The Winter's Tale - “a good nose is requisite also, to smell out work for the other senses.” (A decade later the writer found himself using equipment of similar intent, in South Viet Nam. Named less grandly but probably more straightforwardly as “sniffer”, this kit was mounted in an Iroquois helicopter and flown at speed low – very low; right-down-dodging-treetops low – over the jungle in the early morning to sniff concentrations of human activity beneath the canopy. The wheel turns .... )
But I digress. Why were we at Tarawa anyway, Autolycus the sniffer or no?
Physically it is a large, low-lying coral atoll – reputedly the lagoon is among the largest in the world. Formerly a part of the Gilbert Islands as a British dependency, upon independence in 1979 it became a part of the Republic of Kiribati, pronounced “Kiribas”, which is a transliteration into the local language of the English “Gilberts”; the language lacks the letter “s” so it is rendered as “ti”. Far away in the east in the Line Group, the former Christmas Island, transliterated, becomes “Kiritimati”.
Kiribati does not include the former Ellice part of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands to the south – they are now Tuvalu. Nor does it include Nauru in the west, one of the “phosphate” islands, which is now an independent State. Controversially, however, it does include the other main phosphate mine, Ocean Island, now Banaba. That island is now largely derelict, most of the Banabans having been relocated to Rabi Island (pronounced “Rambi”) in Fiji after World War II, although phosphate mining did continue on Banaba until 1980.
The island groups of Kiribati sprawl over a distance of around 3,000 km east-to-west, and 2,000 km north-to-south. They straddle the Equator and bestride the International Date Line. Tarawa itself is pretty much on a line due north of New Zealand and about 1 degree 25 minutes (85 nautical miles) into the Northern Hemisphere. A common impulse to think of it as of the South Pacific could be challenged, at least technically.
At the time of our incident the RNZAF had a forward base there. Tarawa is a famous name to be sure; but the reason it is familiar to many has little to do with whether or not the RNZAF once had a base there, whether it is situated in the Gilbert Islands or the Republic of Kiribati, whether it is of the South or the North Pacific, or whether the local language spells “s” as “ti”. It was, of course, the scene of a major battle in November 1943 when the Second Marine Division (which had been based at MacKay's Crossing just outside Wellington) landed through the lagoon to wrest it from the Japanese. The tale of valour has been told many times, including the near-disastrous miscalculation of tidal conditions for the Marines' assault landing. We will therefore repeat none of this here, except to remark that the name “Tarawa” has since been borne by two ships of the US Navy, the first an aircraft carrier and the second the class-name parent of a current fleet of five amphibious assault ships.
In the 1950s and on, the RNZAF base was "activated" about once every two months or so, for a week or a fortnight, by a one- or two-aircraft detachment from Laucala Bay in Fiji. That is what our particular Sunderland was doing there – activating.
In those times the Resident Agent (of the British colonial power) was a fellow whose name looked Mediterranean but who was from an old New Zealand family in Christchurch. In keeping with the times the custom was for the visiting detachment commander to pay a call upon the Resident Agent - with all the formalities of the day including visiting cards. This had to be done. Some Somerset Maugham characters would have felt quite at home.
Usually, however, the act itself turned out to be less daunting than the prospect in contemplation beforehand. Hizzonour the Resident Agent, indelibly Kiwi, would like as not wait quietly in the residence, in ambush. When the visiting cards plopped onto the silver salver he would call "Throw yer bloody hat in, 'n' have a beer!"
The British influence went back many years. Arthur Grimes' book “A Pattern of Islands” tells it like it was in the early part of the 20th Century. Nor was our resident agent from Christchurch an anomaly. New Zealand's presence in Tarawa was quite strong from time to time.
For reasons unknown and unexplainable, in the early 1960s the local ex-pats were fond of highland country dancing. As visitors we had to participate, at the Club. Though I come from Dunedin I had to go to a tiny, isolated part of the Pacific to be introduced to these strange Celtic capers. It is difficult to imagine a more discomposing occasion than an introduction to Scottish country dancing in sweaty heat under ceiling fans 85 miles north of the Equator drinking too much Victoria Bitter from Australia paid for with British pounds. One could almost say eccentric, the only obvious alternative being “troppo”.
Tarawa was - and one expects still is - a place of many incongruities besides colonial eccentrics and giddily transplanted rituals from cold Northern climes. On one occasion while at a loose end we explored northern parts of the extensive atoll. Tidal conditions mean that one cannot guarantee to get from islet to islet around the periphery, so the means of travel was a Gilbertese outrigger canoe. Under sail in a straight line those things go like stink, although tacking through the wind can present problems.
On a northern islet we came across a substantial building, made of brick. It turned out to be a convent school. Bold as brass, we knocked at the door, and were invited in. Inside, a number of Gilbertese girls were at that very time sitting GCE examinations written in a language not their own, and about subjects not of their society (nor, one supposes, one which they would ever be likely to know well). Curious are the effects of Empire.
The Mother Superior was an Australian. She said she had left Sydney in 1936, and had never been back. She had not even been off the atoll, except during the Japanese occupation when she had been interned on Abaiang, just to the north. Before her transshipment she had been made to watch the ritual murder of the "coast watchers" (including 17 New Zealanders) by the Japanese on Tarawa (there is now a memorial to them on the beach). When the Marines re-invaded she had heard the sounds of battle below the horizon, but did not know the result until a USN destroyer anchored off Abaiang and eventually returned her to Tarawa.
Sadly this encounter took place before the era of portable recorders, and I had not the sense to write it down immediately, so all I have now to rely upon is memory of a tale told me fifty years ago.
On the same day as we were walking through the village, a voice - not one of ours - called out "kamate, kamate". He was an elderly Gilbertese who, rather curiously, could rattle off the names of many of the railway stations on the main trunk line in the North Island. Intrigued, we probed. He said he had spent time in New Zealand between the wars as part of a labour battalion working on the railway. I was slightly sceptical of his story, but concluded I had no real reason to doubt it. He was convincing, and he did know "kamate" and all that as well as the place names on the main trunk.
Despite this experience of our ways he had trouble with the idea that I was Captain. Too youthful, he thought. In his terms the flight engineer, who was old enough to be my father, should be in charge because with age comes wisdom (he didn't know the engineer as well as I did!).
He offered us toddy, the local and potent fermented coconut brew, prepared right there in the tree. This was illegal. We pointed that out. He said who cares - only those in Betio (it's pronounced “Bay-she-oh”, emphasis on the first syllable) or Bairiki worry about what the Government says. Despite the cultural divide it seems not much was different in Tarawa from other places out of sight of governments.
On another occasion we were sent on an errand of gunboat diplomacy to fly around Nauru (or was it Ocean Is, now Banaba?), with instructions to fire our Browning point-fives into the sea to impress the natives who were restless. We based at Tarawa. We were joined by the RNZN - HMNZS Pukaki I think – which had dashed from Auckland in the middle of post-refit trials. She had made it, though panting somewhat. Wandering the reef in an idle moment I encountered a sailor who had missed the transport back to his ship. I'd been gently observing a crab, backed into a crevice in the coral waving a big fiddler claw. It was a bit pissed off, but about to become more so. He (the sailor) was hungry, he said. He picked up my friend the crab, tore off the claw and ate it right there. No seasoning, either.
The heavy coastal guns then rusting on the seaward foreshore were reputed to have been moved from Singapore by the Japanese - who had made the same mistake of having mounted them facing out to sea when the Marine attack came through the lagoon from behind. Whatever, their massive breech castings were stamped with a legend for posterity to see: "W.G. ARMSTRONG-WHITWORTH, LONDON", which isn't in Japan.
Our Base doctor at Laucala Bay said you could tell which were Japanese bones in the sand at Tarawa if you found feet with remnants of the boots, because they had a divided big toe. (He had a problem with feet, I think. Once, one of the navigators, wearing flip-flops, stubbed his toe on a lump of coral, having mis-navigated the 200 yards back to the barracks from the Club in pitch darkness after the generator was curfewed. He was bleeding quite badly, exciting the weepy self-pity of the hurting drunk. The doctor, who had also partaken improvidently at the Club, could offer no remedy except to apply his stethoscope to the site of the injury, and giggle.)
Speaking of medical matters, on a later occasion I flew the then British High Commissioner for the Western Pacific around his domain - or demesne, as he might have preferred. His home base was in Honiara on Guadalcanal, but Guadalcanal has no seaplane anchorage. We embarked his party early in the morning at Tulaghi on Florida Island, across narrow waters rich in wartime legend. Ironbottom Sound, for example, graveyard of HMAS Canberra and many other ships. Also the infamous "Slot", route of the Tokyo Express. (We'd had adventures of our own during the previous 12 hours when (a) the towed refuelling barge swamped and then overturned, dumping 44-gallon drums of 115/130-octane aviation fuel into the tide, some with their filler caps off, and (b) the aircraft complete with its moorings drifted across the bay in a high wind and heavy chop in the middle of the night; but that is another story).
Whilst at Tulaghi I'd contracted a debilitating case of gastro-enteritis which delayed its full impact until after we reached Tarawa. I was like sick, man, and ready to die. Thought I was going to; even hoped I might. The best the resident ex-pat Scottish medico at Tarawa could do was sympathise and offer a jar of vaseline. The things one suffers for Queen and Country! I've steered clear of bearers of vaseline ever since, especially Caledonians. Also baked beans. By the time I recovered a few days later my crew had eaten almost everything there was, except for what seemed to be a whole barge load of Heinz' finest, courtesy of Burns Philp's Betio Branch. They were all that was left. Yuk!
Communications were not always easy or reliable in that age, before satellites. The HF radio equipment on a Sunderland was principally CW, by Marconi. One conversed at long range in the staccato yet swinging cadence of Morse dots and dashes by carrier wave snatched out of the air as it bounced between the surface and the sometimes turbulent ionised layers high above. On one occasion, however, the turbulence was man-made. While near Tarawa one night, all communication involving HF radio bounce off the ionosphere was disrupted by a nuclear test experiment set off high above the tropopause. We sensed the flash. The aftermath discommoded the reflecting Heaviside layers for a short time.
More normally, on switching to modulated R/T (that is voice mode) in those parts, one could hear a disembodied American voice repeating a message through the ether. It went something like this, in slow, careful enunciation: "Sky King, Sky King, this is Okinawa, this is Okinawa. Do not answer. Do not answer. Authentication is Alfa Charlie. Authentication is Alfa Charlie. Break - break. I say again. Sky King, Sky King, this is Okinawa ....." Over and over. It was both comforting and chilling, though not for its mystery (which was transparent) nor for its bland repetitiveness, but for its significance in the tensions of the Cold War. These were Emergency Action Messages (EAMs, part of the Strategic Air Command system. A reader of this post has recently told me that Okinawa was not one of the base station callsigns on that network, and that it would have been Yokota instead. Yet I heard it as Okinawa at the time; and if that is wrong the error is mine.)
One of our signallers was a radio ham. Once, defying telecommunication regulations, we set up a small, home-built, low-power W/T transmitter ashore at the barracks, and strung a long antenna between two coconut trees more in hope than in expectation. Dah d'dah dit, dah dah d'dah we whispered on the key, repeating it thrice into the ether. CQ-CQ-CQ, we said to the world in the universal shorthand query. Calling all stations; is anyone there? DE (this is) followed by our callsign. Then QTH (my location is) TARAWA, and a tentative K (over). A pause, listening. Nothing but distant, resonant static.
Then the responses crashed in. Suddenly there were incoming calls queued from all over. The United States, Europe, Japan, Okinawa, Australia, New Zealand. And, as news of the contact spread through the amateur bands, more joined the queue in order to log the unusual DX. Having triggered this off at about 8pm, it took until 4am to clear the jam.
Obviously, more than 30 years after the battle for the reef, Tarawa continued to weave strange tropical spells!
Sunderland NZ4117 turned onto final approach to land to the east on the lagoon at Tarawa. The aim was to alight just past the main islet of Betio and parallel to its neighbour Bairiki. The flight from Laucala Bay had been indirect, the aircraft having been tasked to patrol en route. At the time of arrival in the late afternoon of 15 April 1961 fuel was getting low. The aircraft had reserves, but was not going anywhere except the lagoon right there, nor at any time except right now.
But there was a problem. The machine had arrived just as a serious tropical line squall hit the atoll. These things can be of great fury but are normally of short duration. But this one had hung around, delaying the landing. Eventually it abated a little and, although the water was still very rough, the captain decided the time had come.
The lagoon at Tarawa is large, but is reasonably shallow and sheltered particularly from the east, so open-sea swell was not a problem. Because it is so large and the islet periphery so low-lying, however, there is ample fetch for the wind to whip up a significant short-period steep-sided wave train inside the reef. And so it was on this day.
There was no risk of being thrown off the surface by a swell. But, coming the other way at the critical moment, the aircraft met a large, steep-sided wave. Whack – as I've said elsewhere, water is less compressible than dirt.
I was one of three pilots aboard that day, and was standing in the lookout position at the astrodome in the roof. There were no such niceties as being strapped in; the lookout just stood there completely unrestrained. When the aircraft struck, it struck hard enough for me to jump down from the two-foot high platform and look for somewhere to go. Slightly forward and to the right, the navigator had been sitting at his station, task done, waiting for touchdown. On impact he, too, decided he wanted to be somewhere else, and stood up. The result was that we both tried to occupy the same space at the same time, which didn't work.
While we sorted that out the aircraft ploughed on, bucking energetically in the chop. Then it began to sink quite quickly. The keelson had broken under the bow compartment. The planing hull was breached.
The water remained very rough. The break in the keelson could not be dealt with from the inside, and there was no prospect of inspecting the damage or of doing anything about it from the outside until the aircraft was securely moored. Meantime, water was coming into the bow compartment through the break at a great rate.
The APU pump had, as expected, worked briefly and then choked. It was useless. The hand pump could not keep pace with the inflow, though it continued to be used to reduce the effects. This had to be done in relays by crewmembers.
The working stroke on the hand pump was the upstroke - its design assumed an upright stance and the use of the major muscle groups in the back. But it was not possible to stand upright in the bow compartment. Cramped and stooped under the low deckhead, the heavy pull stroke fell to the triceps alone, arms akimbo. With the aircraft still not moored and heaving in the sea, in the confined space and in the enervating temperatures to be expected in equatorial conditions, those doing this heavy work soon succumbed to seasickness. They had no choice but to continue knee-deep in sea water in which now floated their own vomit, and which threatened to spill over the isolating bulkheads into the rearward compartments. This was tenacious stuff, some might say heroic, but it was as much expected of crews as it was necessary. And this crew did have a vested interest!
When the aircraft was finally moored and the squall had subsided, crew members dived over the side to inspect the damage from the outside. After making an impression of the breach with a large piece of Plasticine they reduced the rate of the leak for the time being with coir mats. Then they constructed a plaster-of-Paris mould from the Plasticine former. Finally they melted a (considerable) quantity of solder and formed it using this mould. When it solidified the metal was bolted to the damaged area finally to stop the leak altogether. For the record, a couple of weeks later the recovery crew had shored up the weakened area with timber from the inside, and NZ4117 made it back to Laucala Bay under its own steam for permanent repair. (Since writing this I have found that the aircraft was not repaired, but was written off at Laucala Bay August 1961. My error.)
Mind you, recovery of that particular aircraft was both a priority and a worry. It was rather special, being the only one in the RNZAF fleet to be equipped with then-secret equipment known as Autolycus. This was designed to detect the diesel plume from a submarine snorkel. Obviously it was prone to false alarms as it sniffed other contaminants in the atmosphere, and its indications anyway were coarse and required refinement by other sensors. Presumably it was named for the Shakespearian rogue Autolycus in The Winter's Tale - “a good nose is requisite also, to smell out work for the other senses.” (A decade later the writer found himself using equipment of similar intent, in South Viet Nam. Named less grandly but probably more straightforwardly as “sniffer”, this kit was mounted in an Iroquois helicopter and flown at speed low – very low; right-down-dodging-treetops low – over the jungle in the early morning to sniff concentrations of human activity beneath the canopy. The wheel turns .... )
But I digress. Why were we at Tarawa anyway, Autolycus the sniffer or no?
Physically it is a large, low-lying coral atoll – reputedly the lagoon is among the largest in the world. Formerly a part of the Gilbert Islands as a British dependency, upon independence in 1979 it became a part of the Republic of Kiribati, pronounced “Kiribas”, which is a transliteration into the local language of the English “Gilberts”; the language lacks the letter “s” so it is rendered as “ti”. Far away in the east in the Line Group, the former Christmas Island, transliterated, becomes “Kiritimati”.
Kiribati does not include the former Ellice part of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands to the south – they are now Tuvalu. Nor does it include Nauru in the west, one of the “phosphate” islands, which is now an independent State. Controversially, however, it does include the other main phosphate mine, Ocean Island, now Banaba. That island is now largely derelict, most of the Banabans having been relocated to Rabi Island (pronounced “Rambi”) in Fiji after World War II, although phosphate mining did continue on Banaba until 1980.
The island groups of Kiribati sprawl over a distance of around 3,000 km east-to-west, and 2,000 km north-to-south. They straddle the Equator and bestride the International Date Line. Tarawa itself is pretty much on a line due north of New Zealand and about 1 degree 25 minutes (85 nautical miles) into the Northern Hemisphere. A common impulse to think of it as of the South Pacific could be challenged, at least technically.
At the time of our incident the RNZAF had a forward base there. Tarawa is a famous name to be sure; but the reason it is familiar to many has little to do with whether or not the RNZAF once had a base there, whether it is situated in the Gilbert Islands or the Republic of Kiribati, whether it is of the South or the North Pacific, or whether the local language spells “s” as “ti”. It was, of course, the scene of a major battle in November 1943 when the Second Marine Division (which had been based at MacKay's Crossing just outside Wellington) landed through the lagoon to wrest it from the Japanese. The tale of valour has been told many times, including the near-disastrous miscalculation of tidal conditions for the Marines' assault landing. We will therefore repeat none of this here, except to remark that the name “Tarawa” has since been borne by two ships of the US Navy, the first an aircraft carrier and the second the class-name parent of a current fleet of five amphibious assault ships.
In the 1950s and on, the RNZAF base was "activated" about once every two months or so, for a week or a fortnight, by a one- or two-aircraft detachment from Laucala Bay in Fiji. That is what our particular Sunderland was doing there – activating.
In those times the Resident Agent (of the British colonial power) was a fellow whose name looked Mediterranean but who was from an old New Zealand family in Christchurch. In keeping with the times the custom was for the visiting detachment commander to pay a call upon the Resident Agent - with all the formalities of the day including visiting cards. This had to be done. Some Somerset Maugham characters would have felt quite at home.
Usually, however, the act itself turned out to be less daunting than the prospect in contemplation beforehand. Hizzonour the Resident Agent, indelibly Kiwi, would like as not wait quietly in the residence, in ambush. When the visiting cards plopped onto the silver salver he would call "Throw yer bloody hat in, 'n' have a beer!"
The British influence went back many years. Arthur Grimes' book “A Pattern of Islands” tells it like it was in the early part of the 20th Century. Nor was our resident agent from Christchurch an anomaly. New Zealand's presence in Tarawa was quite strong from time to time.
For reasons unknown and unexplainable, in the early 1960s the local ex-pats were fond of highland country dancing. As visitors we had to participate, at the Club. Though I come from Dunedin I had to go to a tiny, isolated part of the Pacific to be introduced to these strange Celtic capers. It is difficult to imagine a more discomposing occasion than an introduction to Scottish country dancing in sweaty heat under ceiling fans 85 miles north of the Equator drinking too much Victoria Bitter from Australia paid for with British pounds. One could almost say eccentric, the only obvious alternative being “troppo”.
Tarawa was - and one expects still is - a place of many incongruities besides colonial eccentrics and giddily transplanted rituals from cold Northern climes. On one occasion while at a loose end we explored northern parts of the extensive atoll. Tidal conditions mean that one cannot guarantee to get from islet to islet around the periphery, so the means of travel was a Gilbertese outrigger canoe. Under sail in a straight line those things go like stink, although tacking through the wind can present problems.
On a northern islet we came across a substantial building, made of brick. It turned out to be a convent school. Bold as brass, we knocked at the door, and were invited in. Inside, a number of Gilbertese girls were at that very time sitting GCE examinations written in a language not their own, and about subjects not of their society (nor, one supposes, one which they would ever be likely to know well). Curious are the effects of Empire.
The Mother Superior was an Australian. She said she had left Sydney in 1936, and had never been back. She had not even been off the atoll, except during the Japanese occupation when she had been interned on Abaiang, just to the north. Before her transshipment she had been made to watch the ritual murder of the "coast watchers" (including 17 New Zealanders) by the Japanese on Tarawa (there is now a memorial to them on the beach). When the Marines re-invaded she had heard the sounds of battle below the horizon, but did not know the result until a USN destroyer anchored off Abaiang and eventually returned her to Tarawa.
Sadly this encounter took place before the era of portable recorders, and I had not the sense to write it down immediately, so all I have now to rely upon is memory of a tale told me fifty years ago.
On the same day as we were walking through the village, a voice - not one of ours - called out "kamate, kamate". He was an elderly Gilbertese who, rather curiously, could rattle off the names of many of the railway stations on the main trunk line in the North Island. Intrigued, we probed. He said he had spent time in New Zealand between the wars as part of a labour battalion working on the railway. I was slightly sceptical of his story, but concluded I had no real reason to doubt it. He was convincing, and he did know "kamate" and all that as well as the place names on the main trunk.
Despite this experience of our ways he had trouble with the idea that I was Captain. Too youthful, he thought. In his terms the flight engineer, who was old enough to be my father, should be in charge because with age comes wisdom (he didn't know the engineer as well as I did!).
He offered us toddy, the local and potent fermented coconut brew, prepared right there in the tree. This was illegal. We pointed that out. He said who cares - only those in Betio (it's pronounced “Bay-she-oh”, emphasis on the first syllable) or Bairiki worry about what the Government says. Despite the cultural divide it seems not much was different in Tarawa from other places out of sight of governments.
On another occasion we were sent on an errand of gunboat diplomacy to fly around Nauru (or was it Ocean Is, now Banaba?), with instructions to fire our Browning point-fives into the sea to impress the natives who were restless. We based at Tarawa. We were joined by the RNZN - HMNZS Pukaki I think – which had dashed from Auckland in the middle of post-refit trials. She had made it, though panting somewhat. Wandering the reef in an idle moment I encountered a sailor who had missed the transport back to his ship. I'd been gently observing a crab, backed into a crevice in the coral waving a big fiddler claw. It was a bit pissed off, but about to become more so. He (the sailor) was hungry, he said. He picked up my friend the crab, tore off the claw and ate it right there. No seasoning, either.
The heavy coastal guns then rusting on the seaward foreshore were reputed to have been moved from Singapore by the Japanese - who had made the same mistake of having mounted them facing out to sea when the Marine attack came through the lagoon from behind. Whatever, their massive breech castings were stamped with a legend for posterity to see: "W.G. ARMSTRONG-WHITWORTH, LONDON", which isn't in Japan.
Our Base doctor at Laucala Bay said you could tell which were Japanese bones in the sand at Tarawa if you found feet with remnants of the boots, because they had a divided big toe. (He had a problem with feet, I think. Once, one of the navigators, wearing flip-flops, stubbed his toe on a lump of coral, having mis-navigated the 200 yards back to the barracks from the Club in pitch darkness after the generator was curfewed. He was bleeding quite badly, exciting the weepy self-pity of the hurting drunk. The doctor, who had also partaken improvidently at the Club, could offer no remedy except to apply his stethoscope to the site of the injury, and giggle.)
Speaking of medical matters, on a later occasion I flew the then British High Commissioner for the Western Pacific around his domain - or demesne, as he might have preferred. His home base was in Honiara on Guadalcanal, but Guadalcanal has no seaplane anchorage. We embarked his party early in the morning at Tulaghi on Florida Island, across narrow waters rich in wartime legend. Ironbottom Sound, for example, graveyard of HMAS Canberra and many other ships. Also the infamous "Slot", route of the Tokyo Express. (We'd had adventures of our own during the previous 12 hours when (a) the towed refuelling barge swamped and then overturned, dumping 44-gallon drums of 115/130-octane aviation fuel into the tide, some with their filler caps off, and (b) the aircraft complete with its moorings drifted across the bay in a high wind and heavy chop in the middle of the night; but that is another story).
Whilst at Tulaghi I'd contracted a debilitating case of gastro-enteritis which delayed its full impact until after we reached Tarawa. I was like sick, man, and ready to die. Thought I was going to; even hoped I might. The best the resident ex-pat Scottish medico at Tarawa could do was sympathise and offer a jar of vaseline. The things one suffers for Queen and Country! I've steered clear of bearers of vaseline ever since, especially Caledonians. Also baked beans. By the time I recovered a few days later my crew had eaten almost everything there was, except for what seemed to be a whole barge load of Heinz' finest, courtesy of Burns Philp's Betio Branch. They were all that was left. Yuk!
Communications were not always easy or reliable in that age, before satellites. The HF radio equipment on a Sunderland was principally CW, by Marconi. One conversed at long range in the staccato yet swinging cadence of Morse dots and dashes by carrier wave snatched out of the air as it bounced between the surface and the sometimes turbulent ionised layers high above. On one occasion, however, the turbulence was man-made. While near Tarawa one night, all communication involving HF radio bounce off the ionosphere was disrupted by a nuclear test experiment set off high above the tropopause. We sensed the flash. The aftermath discommoded the reflecting Heaviside layers for a short time.
More normally, on switching to modulated R/T (that is voice mode) in those parts, one could hear a disembodied American voice repeating a message through the ether. It went something like this, in slow, careful enunciation: "Sky King, Sky King, this is Okinawa, this is Okinawa. Do not answer. Do not answer. Authentication is Alfa Charlie. Authentication is Alfa Charlie. Break - break. I say again. Sky King, Sky King, this is Okinawa ....." Over and over. It was both comforting and chilling, though not for its mystery (which was transparent) nor for its bland repetitiveness, but for its significance in the tensions of the Cold War. These were Emergency Action Messages (EAMs, part of the Strategic Air Command system. A reader of this post has recently told me that Okinawa was not one of the base station callsigns on that network, and that it would have been Yokota instead. Yet I heard it as Okinawa at the time; and if that is wrong the error is mine.)
One of our signallers was a radio ham. Once, defying telecommunication regulations, we set up a small, home-built, low-power W/T transmitter ashore at the barracks, and strung a long antenna between two coconut trees more in hope than in expectation. Dah d'dah dit, dah dah d'dah we whispered on the key, repeating it thrice into the ether. CQ-CQ-CQ, we said to the world in the universal shorthand query. Calling all stations; is anyone there? DE (this is) followed by our callsign. Then QTH (my location is) TARAWA, and a tentative K (over). A pause, listening. Nothing but distant, resonant static.
Then the responses crashed in. Suddenly there were incoming calls queued from all over. The United States, Europe, Japan, Okinawa, Australia, New Zealand. And, as news of the contact spread through the amateur bands, more joined the queue in order to log the unusual DX. Having triggered this off at about 8pm, it took until 4am to clear the jam.
Obviously, more than 30 years after the battle for the reef, Tarawa continued to weave strange tropical spells!
